Guyanese Online

Especially this election, politics can be such a downer. So here’s a piece of good-ish piece of news for you: We, as a country, are not as freaked out about our presidential race as we might seem. In fact, a majority of Americans are actually okay with either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump being our next president.

A new Washington Post – ABC News poll found 65 percent of Americans are comfortable with voting with either of the two major-party presumptive candidates. The finding suggests Americans may not be as anxious about this election as we all think, write our in-house polling gurus, Emily Guskin and Scott Clement.

Okay so that’s the good news. Now back to our regularly scheduled not-so-uplifting news: Notice we didn’t say a majority of Americans like their choices. They’re just okay with them. In fact, only 20 percent are comfortable with just Trump as their choice, and 39 percent are comfortable with just Clinton as their choice.

Guskin and Clement say that disparity can be explained away by partisanship: Americans are comfortable with their choices for president simply because they are their party’s choices for president. In other words, this poll is more accurately read as evidence that we’re a nation that votes for our commander-in-chief based on our political allegiances.

Don’t hold your breath for a third party candidate

Some more interesting findings from the poll: More than a third of voters (31 percent) who are anxious about their choices say they’re seriously considering a third-party candidate. It’s safe to say there’s a lot of young people in that category: Almost almost half of voters under 30 (48 percent to be exact) say they’re anxious about both candidates.

But we don’t expect voters to actually follow through on that. Here’s how the race shapes up if those anxious voters are given other choices: Donald Trump — not a third-party candidate — wins.

Plus, historically, support for third-party candidates fade as we get closer to Election Day (125 days!) and people line up with — you guessed it — the two major political parties.

“In past elections, the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans have put their anxieties aside and voted in favor of party’s candidate,” write Guskin and Clement. “More than 90 percent did in 2012.”

Did Bernie Sanders blow his chance by ignoring Hillary Clinton’s email scandal? Mic.com’s Tom McKay asks that a day after the FBI decided she was “extremely careless” about sending/receiving classified information over her private system but that there wasn’t enough to prosecute her. (All the deets you ever wanted about Tuesday’s big email news are here.)

On the surface, it would seem that for Sanders to have attacked Clinton where she was weak — she struggles with perceptions of honesty and trustworthiness — would have boosted Sanders’s candidacy. Instead, he famously shouted in an October debate: “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your own emails!”